This is Flight to Quality’s AI policy.

It is not our personal opinion on AI. It is a company policy that recognises AI is here, it’s incredibly hard to avoid, and many people find it useful. Including several of the clients we work with. Including us.

What is AI good for?

It’s great for automating boring tasks. It’s great at carrying out content audits and research (as long as you do your own analysis before, during and after). It’s great at building things like content calendars after deciding what you want to create, and who it is for. And it’s great for interview transcription. But again, not perfect. 

In other words, it’s a helpful input tool. Part of the whole toolkit when you’re building up everything needed as part of the thinking process. But it’s not, in our view, a secure environment in which to put confidential client information.

So, we don’t enter confidential client information into generative AI tools.

Input vs output

We also don’t think generative AI is an appropriate output tool. It doesn’t work as a shortcut to creating good writing.

Don’t misconstrue this as writerly nostalgia for a simpler time. It’s simply that when it comes to writing, we find AI is usually more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not the best decider of the words we use. It hasn’t done the thinking necessary to solve the client's or their customer’s problem. That’s what we do.

Because writing is about thinking and articulating those thoughts for the benefit of others. And no writer ever got into this job because they didn’t want to write.

So, we operate a two-stage input/output model which we think is in both our best interests and in the best interests of our clients.

Our AI use happens at the input stage

Input means back-office work. The work we do before the writing job begins. This includes industry and subject matter research. Content audits. Content calendars. Content checklists. Interview transcriptions. And input applies to non-confidential content openly shared between us as the service provider and the clients we provide writing services to.

We don’t use it at the output stage

Our output: namely the content written for our clients’ customers, in all their forms (investors, consumers, stakeholders, etc.). That’s all written by a human.

We operate a human workflow process. Each client job gets its own numbered job bag. We use an electronic notebook to jot down meeting notes and the ideas that form from them. We then build a master content document with tracked changes turned on at the outset, so the full drafting history is logged. When the draft is complete, a copy is saved with the tracked changes accepted. Clients receive this clean version, and also a second document containing all of the research and references used to gather information.

The client’s wishes stay paramount

So, input: yes; output: no. And if clients want the input process to be AI-free, we can do that too. Either way, we don’t put confidential client information into generative AI tools.

Here’s the unavoidable caveat

Will this prevent accusations that AI was used on content? No. There’s nothing that can be done right now to prevent accusations from AI detectors, which have a reputation for being inconsistent and generating false positives, especially within business writing. And we don’t want to create a surveillance state of mind where we have to justify where every moment of inspiration came from.

But what we can provide for our clients is a well-documented human workflow process, an audit trail and each piece of content signed by the writer. Because it’s human-written, there’s no AI watermark to suggest the content has been AI-processed. 

We stand behind the words we write

We think we’re at the beginning of a trend where “Written by a human: [Name here]” will become the dividing line and the selling point that highlights the difference between human-generated content and AI approximations. Clients may choose to use that on their content or not. 

But we want to commit to all our clients that the work we do springs from our collaboration. Yours and ours, as much as humanly possible.